Agrell, Wilhelm

Abstract [en]

The Norway attacks on 22 July 2011 were not only one of the most horrific events in modern Norwegian and Scandinavian history but also a critical situation that tested Norwegian society's crisis management capability over a broad and somewhat unforeseen spectrum. Many of the lessons were more or less obvious, others more diffuse and more difficult to translate into reforms. One such area was the lack of warning, which resulted in Norwegian society's crisis management system having to improvise. Was 22 July 2011 one of a series of major intelligence and warning failures? Or was Anders Behring Breivik, in actual fact, an exponent of fundamentally redrawing the security map, where threats no longer allow themselves to be categorized, mapped, and evaluated, but arise from unforeseen societal and individual processes? In this report by the Swedish National Defence College's Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies (CATS), Wilhelm Agrell examines the warning dimension in the course of events before and during the terror attacks and discusses the overall, universally applicable conclusions that can be drawn from how questions about threat scenarios and warning are handled. The work on this report is part of the Intelligence Studies Project financed by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency. Wilhelm Agrell is professor of intelligence analysis at Lund University and a visiting professor at the Swedish National Defence College. He has written a number of books on Swedish security policy and intelligence matters, including Essence of Assessment: Methods and Problems of Intelligence Analysis, published by CATS in 2012.